Portland-based—but food world-renowned—writer Mindy Fox has over 20 cookbooks under her belt. She’s penned some solo: one on salads, another on roast chicken, a Short Stack Edition on ginger. She’s ghostwritten others she can’t mention. And her collaborative projects have put her in the kitchen cooking Mediterranean food with chef Sara Jenkins of Nina June in Rockport, happily in the weeds developing recipes to fit Atkins diet requirements, in the middle of Top Chef judge Gail Simmons’ adventurous food life, and, most recently, behind the scenes with TV personality Antoni Porowski, food and wine expert on the Netflix series Queer Eye. Fox and Porowski’s first book, Antoni in the Kitchen, was a 2019 New York Times bestseller. Their second, Antoni: Let’s Do Dinner, is making its way to your favorite local bookstore as you read this article.
Fox graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a degree in communications arts where she focused on the history, theory, criticisms and cultural uses of television, film and radio. She earned her cooking chops in high-end restaurants and catering companies in Boston. She landed her first food writing job as an assistant editor at Saveur magazine in New York and spent three years as editorial director at Earth Pledge, where she created a multimedia platform called FarmToTable to connect communities with their local farmers.
She brings to her publishing partnerships a deep understanding of the formula for cookbook making, a tenacious capacity for writing interesting recipes for cooks at all levels, and a knack for drawing food stories and taste memories out of her collaborators.
Fox’s partnerships land on her plate in different ways. She and Jenkins were friends because Fox frequented the rising chef’s New York restaurant, Patio Dining. She got to record the recipes chef Mark Ladner served at his Michelin-starred Del Posto restaurant through connections she’d cultivated as food editor at La Cucina Italiana magazine. It was their respective agents who set up Fox and Porowski’s introductory phone call.
Regardless how she arrives at a partnership, Fox walks away from the experience having learned a lot.Each collaboration starts with having to look at ingredients, pairings, and cooking techniques from a different point of view. Take chicken broth, for example. “Sara has this wonderful way of making rich chicken broth. She simmers it for a very long time. The simmering is so gentle, the bubbles barely break the surface,” says Fox. Of course, Fox made gallons of broth before working with Jenkins. But since learning to love Jenkins’ process, it’s Jenkins’ voice Fox listens to every time she makes it now. “Hearing things like ‘the bubbles should barely break the surface’ in your head years after working with another person—that’s a good illustration of the lasting impression the collaborative process of making a cookbook can have on a writer,” says Fox. Working with Porowski, whose parents immigrated to Montreal from Poland, sparked Fox to explore her own Polish heritage. “I’d never felt proud of being Polish, nor did I think Polish food was particularly interesting. But seeing how excited Antoni got about Polish food, I found I wanted to learn more about it,” says Fox. She’s particularly enamored with chlodnik (pronounced hwahd-nihk), a chilled beet soup with pickles and dill featured in their first book. Working to record that recipe together, Porowski introduced Fox to a bottled borscht concentrate she now buys on visits to Bogusha’s Polish Restaurant & Deli on Stevens Avenue in Portland. “As food people we spend zillions of hours behind our stoves, watching cooking shows, scrolling through Instagram, reading cookbooks. Even with that exposure, we’ve only scratched the surface of what there is to know about how food touches every single part of life,” says Fox. Her advice is to keep learning. You can start with her recipes below:
